The incel theory of violence is wrong.

But, but, but, if you have a religion like Islam, it becomes true. Under certain conditions, unmarried men are violent. But it isn’t necessarily the case that unmarried men are violence. Let me explain.

Take Jim. Jim is a 34 year old porn addict who lives upstairs in his parent’s house. He has very few friends, and all of them are from playing League of Legends, or whatever you aging Millennials are playing these days. He doesn’t have sex very often, and his job is pretty sad. He’s a security guard at the mall, which means he’s paid to look at his phone all day, and occasionally walk around to scan an app on a bar code to prove that he’s walking around the mall.

Jim is skinny-fat, and has a bad diet. He doesn’t workout, and he isn’t musically talented. He doesn’t go out to bars or socialize much. He downloaded Tinder, but doesn’t get many matches. He sort of hates women, because he sees them all as “useless sluts.” He isn’t a Christian, but he thinks the best part of the Bible is where Eve is blamed for everything. He is a Trump supporter, and hopes abortion gets banned, so “those sluts will be put back in their place.”

There are millions of men like Jim, but none of them are very violent. The best predictor of violence is race and drug use. Jim, as a half-Mexican half-white 34 year old man who vapes and sometimes smokes weed, is just not very dangerous.

Yesterday, on Monday, February 24, 2025, the ATF executed a DC Superior arrest warrant for 26-year-old Keshaun Farmer. Keshaun shot a dude in our nation’s capital. Maybe Keshaun was an incel; I don’t know, you can look up his picture with his face tattoos and tell me what you think. I just don’t think that unmarried men are driving violence in America.

Look at January 6th. Were some of those guys incels? Sure, but many of them were married Boomers, with kids. Many of them had sex. I don’t think the primary drive behind January 6th was incels; I think it was the implicit white racialism of the Trump movement, combined with Qanon conspiracies, which were influenced by declining religious cohesion.

If the incel theory was correct, Keshaun should be peaceful, while Jim should be violent. That seems silly.

You could argue that “it’s not about incels, but unmarried men are less stable because they don’t have the social bondage to females which moderates violent tendencies.”

A Finnish study from 2022 looked at the crime rates between single, married, and cohabitating men, controlling for age. Between ages 15 and 22, men who lived with their parents had a very high rate of crime in comparison with those who were single, married, or cohabitating. However, after age 22, living with your parents actually suppressed crime.

What about those who were single vs cohabitating? Well, from age 17 to 24, it’s true that “incels” were slightly more criminal, but not by much. After 24, men who were single, as opposed to cohabitating, had a lower rate of crime. Those with gfs were more criminal. After age 30, even married men were more criminal than single men. (link.springer.com/artic…)

In Islam, the religious and cultural incentives are a bit different. It does seem like unmarried Islamic men are extremely violence, especially in war-torn dystopian societies like Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. I’m not an expert on why Islam encourages young single men to be so violent, but suffice to say, it is not accurate to generalize this phenomenon to all men everywhere.

In the past, such as during the Viking age, you could say we had “global Islam,” in the sense that every culture all over the world was hyper-masculine and violent. Medieval Scotland, for example, had extreme levels of violence, much higher than we see today in Detroit or Chicago (with the caveat that we have better healthcare today, which obscures the level of violence, but still).

The problem with conservatives is that they bemoan the rise of porn and the K-12 feminization of men, but they are still using medieval/Islamic models for how inceldom will affect violence.

So in conclusion, no, incels are not about to rise up and start bombing government offices. Political violence in the future will be driven by religious fanatics and ideologues, concerned with racial diversity or pizzagate conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists are more likely to be Republican, and Republicans are more likely to be married. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ar…)

It’s possible that conspiracy theorists are a subset of Republicans who do not get married, and I’d like to see more data on this. But I see no evidence that banning abortion, porn, and no-fault divorce would help these men.

When conservatives fear-monger about the danger of “incel violence,” they are playing into hysterical leftist fantasies. Implicitly, they are threatening terrorism if you don’t give them what they want. The problem of political violence is worth taking seriously, but the incel theory of violence doesn’t map well onto the existing data (unless you’re talking about a country that is already war-torn and poor, in which case, the incel theory works quite well).